Colleges Are Using COVID as an Excuse for Austerity. Unions Are Pushing Back.
Union workers protest layoffs at Harvard University on January 14, 2021, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Stuart Cahill / MediaNews Group / Boston Herald
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As COVID-19 swept across the U.S. last winter and spring, colleges and universities adapted swiftly to the situation. Though it was swift, it was not without pain: Just as quickly as professors learned to teach through a screen on Zoom, administrations slashed budgets. In the early days of the pandemic, little was certain about the future if students would defer fall enrollment, how states might cut education funding or if the federal government would step in to offset the financial impact of the crises. Nevertheless, public and private higher education institutions across the country put in place austerity measures ahead of what they foresaw as a fiscal emergency.
What is motivating teachers unions to keep public schools closed for as long as possible?
We’ve constantly heard from the left about the need to “follow the science” in dealing with the coronavirus, as President Joe Biden has repeatedly pledged to do. Yet the gap between administration policies or even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and the scientific facts about how the virus is spread is considerable.
Given that we’ve known since last summer that younger children are unlikely to spread the virus and that the CDC has made it clear that schools can safely reopen even without all teachers having been vaccinated, the stubborn refusal of public school teachers unions to agree to go back to the classrooms is puzzling.
Thomas Donilon discusses his distinguished career in business and government, including his role as national security advisor under President Barack Obama, working with three U.S. presidents, serving at the state department, and his current roles at BlackRock and the Council on Foreign Relations.
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